Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

When your system boots, several things happen in sequence, and these vary slightly depending on trivial differences (such as which bootloader you're using, though mostly it's Grub these days).

One of these things is that the kernel extracts itself and loads, before handing over control to the init system (systemd).

While the kernel is loading, it also detects hardware in the system and adds the appropriate module to its running state so that hardware can be correctly interacted with and managed.

When we list modules with lsmod, we're actually just printing /proc/modules in a more readable format.